Five Fantastic Stories brings together five sharp, strange, and memorable works of classic science fiction and fantasy by Algis Budrys, Frank Herbert, Robert Sheckley, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Jamie Wild. These are stories of alien contact, future war, psychological danger, technological absurdity, social satire, and worlds where one wrong assumption can change everything. From military defeat and interstellar respect to alien observation, homicidal madness, and a machine-age promise that solves every problem in the same horrifying way, this collection captures the range and bite of mid-century speculative storytelling.
Included here are "The Stoker and the Stars" by Algis Budrys, "Missing Link" by Frank Herbert, "Bad Medicine" by Robert Sheckley, and "2 B R 0 2 B" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Each story offers a different doorway into the fantastic: Budrys's hard-edged space-age conflict, Herbert's interest in perception and alien intelligence, Sheckley's dark comic attack on sanity and social machinery, Vonnegut's bleakly funny vision of population control and bureaucratic death, and Wild's pulp-driven sense of wonder.
This Positronic edition is suited to readers of classic science fiction, vintage fantasy, short fiction, pulp-era magazines, social satire, alien encounter stories, dystopian fiction, and the early work of major speculative writers. Five Fantastic Stories is a compact anthology with unusually strong name recognition, pairing Herbert, Vonnegut, Budrys, and Sheckley with the speed, irony, danger, and conceptual punch that made magazine science fiction one of the most inventive storytelling forms of the twentieth century. Explore other exciting Positronic Books devoted to classic science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.